1. Field of Invention
The present invention relates to the field of networking communications and more particularly to a method and system for allowing quality of service support across disparate networking technologies such as Frame Relay, ATM, Ethernet and Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS).
2. Description of the Related Art
Network technologies are not homogeneous. End-to-end connections can span multiple networking technologies, for example, Ethernet, asynchronous transfer mode (ATM), frame relay (FR), MPLS, and Internet protocol (IP). In addition, an Ethernet network may include multiple customer edge devices, switches, and routers. These components may communicate using different protocols, spanning the various layers of the OSI interworking model (e.g., L1-L7). For example, routers communicate using a layer three (L3) protocol while the switches communicate using a layer two (L2) protocol.
While solutions have been proposed to allow the transport of data between end points supported by disparate technologies, such solutions are typically inadequate solutions as they are limited to encapsulation and data extraction and simple repacketizing. These solutions fail to consider or address the preservation of aspects of the data transport environment such as quality of service, prioritization, etc. For example, user priority bits in an Ethernet frame are ignored and/or dropped when current technologies convert or encapsulate the data for delivery on the ATM, frame relay or MPLS portions of the network.
In addition, although there is a large push by service providers to offer MPLS core networks for the transport of their customer's data, and while there have been proposals which provide for service interworking models between Ethernet and frame relay (or ATM) attachment circuits over an MPLS core, when the supported service is a native Ethernet service, these proposals do not consider the QoS aspects of the interworking. In particular, these proposals and their implementations do not address important aspects of networking such as Quality of Service (“QoS”) mapping between heterogeneous attachment circuits (AC) and do not address QoS mapping between these ACs and MPLS core. As used herein the term attachment circuit refers to the portion(s) of the end-to-end communication circuit that connects the user device to the service provider network, for example, ACs may be used to provide access to a service provider's MPLS core backbone network.